Ally of Colombian president accused of profiting from paramilitary terror for banana exports
By Frank Bajak
ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:37 p.m. December 14, 2006
BOGOTA, Colombia – A political ally of President Alvaro Uribe is under investigation for allegedly doing business with illegal right-wing militias as head of a company that sells fruit for shipment to the United States and Europe.
Juan Manuel Campo, a member of the Uribe-allied Conservative Party's executive committee, heads a company that supplies 40 tons of plantain bananas a week from land cleared of its rightful owners through intimidation by banned paramilitaries.
The federal prosecutor's office and the attorney general's office, which regulates public servants, opened investigations after residents of the fertile jungle zone just south of Panama complained to human rights organizations.
Officials in both offices told The Associated Press this week that they are trying to determine whether Campo, 30, had benefited economically from ties with the militias.
The revelation comes amid a growing political scandal in which other close Uribe allies have been jailed on charges of creating and bankrolling paramilitary militias, which have committed thousands of murders and perpetrated widescale land theft over the past decade.
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http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20061214-1437-colombia-paramilitarybusiness.htmlColombia: Fear for safety/Death threats
PUBLIC AI Index: AMR 23/050/2006
13 December 2006
UA 333/06 Fear for safety/Death threats
COLOMBIA Marqueza Arrieta (f)
Domingo Tovar Arrieta (m) Director of the Human Rights Department of the
Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), Colombian Trade Union Confederation
Marqueza Arrieta, whose son is a prominent trade unionist, has received death
threats from men believed to be paramilitaries. The real target is believed to
be her son, Domingo Tovar Arrieta, a leading trade union activist. His entire
family are thought to be in danger.
On 4 December Marqueza Arrieta was stopped in the street by two men on a
motorbike, who told her, la vamos a matar, está advertida ("we are going to
kill you, you have been warned"). She reported this to the fiscalía (local
Attorney General’s office) in her home municipality of Corozal, Sucre
Department, in northern Colombia. This was apparently the latest and most
serious of a string of threats she has received over the last few years.
Domingo Tovar Arrieta is the Director of the Human Rights Department of the
Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), Colombian Trade Union Confederation. He
has been threatened repeatedly since November 2003, after he and the CUT
supported a campaign calling on voters to abstain in a referendum the Colombian
government was promoting to gain popular support for wide-ranging social and
economic reforms, the government lost the referendum. He received an anonymous
call from a man who apparently told him, Pagará con su vida la pérdida del
referendo ("You will pay with your life for the loss of the referendum") (see
Further Information on UA 89/03, AMR 23/070/2003, 6 November 2003).
On 5 September Domingo Tovar Arrieta sent a letter to the Colombian government
and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights complaining that since
November 2003 he had been under frequent surveillance, and he and his family
had received telephoned death threats.
On 11 March 2005, the CUT issued a press release which indicated that
army-backed paramilitary leaders in the Department of Córdoba had drawn up a
list of trade unionists to be killed, supposedly because they had been critical
of the government-sponsored process of supposed paramilitary demobilization.
According to the press release members of the XVII and XII Brigades of the
Colombian Army would be involved in carrying out the killings and that Domingo
Tovar was a key target.
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http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR230502006
Colombian right-wing President Alvaro Uribe and friend